Hi!
I wonder whether we should have a way of flagging a story as unobjectionable but not worth anyone’s time to read.
There’s already a trickle of these and I expect there will be a lot more as AI takes off … but IMO there’s no need for the flagger to have to decide whether the story is written by an AI or not - they could just be saying “nothing to see here; move along”.
Sorry if this has been asked and answered. (I did a quick search for it but maybe my search fu failed me.)
We added it in 2013. It lasted about three months (code). (A restricted version was proposed but didn’t get much interest.) In short, it was used as “I disagree” or “I dislike”, it didn’t improve anything. The “Hide” feature has worked out well. I’d be open to adding it back if there’s something different about it or the circumstances that seems like it’ll work out better, but so far this is pretty much exactly what we tried before.
I’ve been kicking around a similar idea with similar goals: remove the -1 to score from flagging to disincentivize people using flags to knock down things they’re not interested in or disagree with. As jcs predicted in that second thread, it’s still a problem and I occasionally DM people who make a habit of it to ask them to knock it off. Maybe twice it’s been a user following another around the site and flagging all their stuff, but it’s worth noting flags are infrequent and visible to mods, so that tends to pop out to us. As a second part of the change, make hiding a story give the score a -1 if the user also does not comment or vote on of its any comments. I’m trying to thread the needle so that there isn’t a value to misusing flags. I think this would reward the right things and would appreciate criticism.
Keeping the -1 makes a lot of sense, but I do like the requirement to comment on the story if you’re also flagging it.
Now of course, the flipside of this is that–as somebody who generally comments and explains my flags–the community needs to quit bitching every time somebody actually attempts to flag and explain content that’s bad or off-topic. The amount of “you’re not my real mod” I’ve seen occur is incredibly tiresome.
I deployed this change, which I developed on stream.
People use Hiding so much that this has marked database posts I normally submit as 0/going negative. I think they’re good posts but now my submission history looks like I’m submitting garbage.
This completely disincentivizes me from posting anything since of course people with diverse interests here will want to hide things they aren’t interested in. I use Hiding to remove stuff I just don’t personally want to see. I use flagging when something is low effort. I don’t want my own Hiding of something to penalize the post either personally.
I truly appreciate your efforts with the community but I am not going to submit posts anymore if/while Hiding a post counts as a -1.
First of all, I have to say that I appreciate the efforts as well! I actually thought it was a great idea, but seeing this change in action made me realize that it was wrong (or at least that it needs more tuning).
A lot of the value I find here lies in the wide diversity of topics. Frequently, the stories I learn the most from do not score very well (around 10 or less). Of course, many of the posts I submit also do not score very well.
I think it’s OK and valuable to have such posts around. Some people get value from them and they disappear quickly from the first page anyway.
With this change, as @eatonphil says, many of these stories will not be submitted anymore. And Lobsters is going to look a lot more like a mono-culture.
I believe that part of the problem is that the upvotes are too random to represent anything significant (because we often forget or whatever), while hiding a story is never random.
I actually submitted a bug on GH for this because I was seeing so many on-topic submissions having zero or negative scores. Turns out it was Working As Designed.
I’m not a fan of this change either, at least not right now. It might shake out to be ok once people learn that hitting “Hide” is now a downvote. But I don’t think it works semantically. I don’t filter anything, because I like seeing what’s on the site. But I do get a bit tired when Rust nerds (for example) get into the weeds about something they really enjoy, and I use the “hide” feature to remove that particular source of comments from the /comments feed. I don’t have anything against Rust, it’s often on-topic and good quality, it’s just not something I’m always interested in.
Specifically, I feel that the action of a small number of people (the ones that are not interested in certain topics and are not filtering) have an outsized effect on the margins for new submissions. A few grumpy users who might expect a flood of comments they’re not interested in can keep an on-topic and otherwise high-quality submission from the front page.
@pushcx has the number of “hide” submissions for new submissions increased since the change? It’s not a factor I’ve made any note of before, and it’s also nothing that’s reflected in the JSON output.
I can’t answer, the database didn’t timestamp the record that a user had hidden a story. I’ve added it but there’s no historical data to compare against.
So I saw that story hiding was pretty infrequent, but I didn’t realize that people are often hiding stories within minutes of them appearing, before anyone has upvoted. In talking with these users, it’s most commonly because it’s a way they can mark the last time they read /newest. (I’ll add a line for this, similar to hckrnews.com.) But it wasn’t at all the only answer and I’m convinced that hide just has too many other uses and other reasons for this change to work.
It’s also been uncommon for stories to hit zero or negative on Lobsters for a long time. I also shared the unexpectedly strong emotional reaction to seeing /newest with several grayed-out stories, there’s ah “oh no” in the pit of my stomach. I thought of it as making scores a little more dynamic but underestimated the effect of the difference. I’m sorry to anyone who shared this feeling, especially submitters.
I’m backing out the change to try a sort of middle position, so that there’s a -1 to score if a user flags and hides the story. I’m still hoping to reduce the impulse to use arbitrary flags as a ‘disgree and punish’ button. (Me individually DMing users who do this is unsustainable, especially as it’s now rare for someone to do it often, so the situation is ambiguous, so the conversation is a delicate and disagreeable one.) To look at it from the perspective before hiding affected scores, flags only reduce a story’s score if the flagger is also so done with the story that they don’t want to see it again. The code is here and I’m running
update_score_and_recalculate!on all stories submitted or hidden since Monday to revert the effects.I appreciate folks giving it a couple days, and thank you for all the feedback and ideas for future improvements. I’m sorry this change was so unpleasant and hopefully future mistakes continue to be small and survivable.
(ping to @eatonphil and @jmiven who replied upstream)
Appreciate the consideration, pushcx! I was very worried I’d have to find some new community to discuss all the various systems programming topics we do here. I’m relieved to need not. :)
Thank you!
In retrospect it’s obvious. But I too did have a tunnel vision when you talked about it, and only considered the “hiding by disagreement” side of this. Even though I did hide things previously as I don’t like to filter full tags.
Is this to mean “punishing” a user’s karma that hide stories that don’t interest them if they don’t comment or vote?
Sorry, I tried to cram a lot in that sentence. I mean: hiding a story gives it a -1, but only if the hiding user also hasn’t commented or voted in the thread. Sometimes people get angry in an argument and reach for any site feature that might punish the person they disagree with. So hiding would only reduce the story’s score if the hider really just didn’t want to see the story.
Thank you. That makes complete sense to me (as does your other comment).
Given that we can only hide stories but it might become a moderator signal, is there a world where the similar logic applies to comments? A harsher alternative to simply hiding the conversation, I guess.
I’ve upvoted this suggestion because I think it’s an interesting idea worth considering as a community, but not because I’m actually ready to support the idea yet.
Two thoughts, one leaning con, the other maybe pro:
Perhaps I’m paranoid, but one thing that worries me about this is simply too much abuse potential. More than any other flag reason that exists at present, it feels most like it has more potential to be abused as a general ‘dislike’ button.
Would this flag reason be for stories only or for stories and comments? We haven’t had much of the Reddit/HN tendency to respond to stories with lazy jokes yet, but if it did start to become more of an issue this flag reason in comments might help to rein it in.
I think that’s already covered by
I believe that
spamworks fine for this usecase, and have used it that way for about a decade now.Is it possible to ignore certain tags? I’d like to ignore the “nix” tag. Would be a nice feature.
Yes, I believe that is the primary purpose of tags.
Visit https://lobste.rs/filters
oh, thanks!
As far as I can tell, Lobsters already has several mechanisms to address “low effort” content.
Users can stop it from ranking highly on the home page:
Moderators sometimes action on serial posters of low effort content, based on what I understand from the moderation log.
Is there something that you feel an explicit “low content” flag would cover that existing mechanisms don’t?
I wouldn’t flag low quality content as spam, because it’s not spam, it’s different.
P.S. I don’t really have an opinion about the proposal. I do think lobsters has a lot of comments that fail the “have you thought about the alternate view for 5 seconds?” test. So, on the one hand, plenty of comments deserve a “low effort” flag. On the other hand, I suspect any such flag would become a tool for people writing bad comments to downvote opinions they dislike.
I’d actually forgotten that we could flag comments! My bad. My proposal is meant only for whole stories.